5,000 LA volunteers count hard-to-find homeless

LOS ANGELES 
Homeless people are frequently seen everywhere in this city, which ranks as the U.S. capital of homelessness. But that doesn't mean they're easy to find when you're looking for them.

More than 5,000 volunteers, equipped with maps, clipboards and flashlights, scoured 4,000 square miles of the city and county of Los Angeles this week to count the homeless.

They peered down back alleys, scanned junk-filled cars and checked crevices beneath freeway overpasses in what officials say is the nation's largest homeless census.

With two-thirds of the county's estimated 43,000 homeless people living on the street, the only way to count them was to go out and find them, said Michael Arnold, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency in charge of the count.

The federal government requires communities to count their homeless population every two years in order to qualify for homeless assistance funding.

Street counting is a labor-intensive task that requires using a lot of old-fashioned shoe-leather after dark, when homeless people are bedding down for the night, their most stationary time of day.

But it's also a time when homeless people tend to hide to protect themselves from attacks and robberies, making them hard to spot.

Sometimes discerning who is homeless is harder than it appears, even when applying the federal definition of homeless - people living in places unfit for human habitation, including sidewalks, parks and shelters. Vehicles often are the first stop when people lose permanent housing.

"A lot of homeless people don't look homeless," said census-taker Ginger Grimes, who volunteered during all three nights of the count.

Census-takers are instructed not to ask people if they are homeless or shine flashlights on them but instead exercise judgment when they encounter blankets in car windows, people with lots of stuff, or boxes arranged like a makeshift camp.

Grimes, a critical theory and social justice student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and classmate Samantha Sencer-Mura criss-crossed a neighborhood near a freeway in West Los Angeles Wednesday night to tally the unsheltered.

They stopped to study a man who appeared to be sleeping in a car parked on an unlit, out-of-the-way industrial street.

"I can't think why else he would be there," Grimes said. "He's been there for a while."

Sencer-Mura entered a hash mark on her tally.

They came across a string of RVs parked along a street, a common sight around the area. One had bowls of cat food set neatly on the sidewalk next to it. That got a hash mark. Another RV that looked clean and newish, didn't merit a mark.

Grimes and Sencer-Mura peered through openings in chain-link fences at a dark weed-choked embankment along a freeway, looking for any signs of habitation other than garbage, but there didn't seem to be any.

A clearing sheltered by trees looked like it had once been a homeless hangout. An old box and shirt lay on the ground, but no one was there. A shopping cart filled with junk stood on a sidewalk, but appeared abandoned.